Recycle Cermark

[Ken Baker Overland Park, Ks]

Just joined this blog and am way jazzed to find such an active engravers source of tips and advice. Would like to reciprocate. We go through a very large amount of Cermark LMM6000 and out of necessity figured out that we can recycle/reuse three times. Very simple, we wash with tap water all engraved parts in a large Pyrex Casserole dish until the water is very thick with cermark solution. We then let water evaporate for a couple of days. The cermark dries and crusts on the dish. We then use a utility knife blade to scrape it off. Reconstitute it with denatured and your off and burning. One heads up. With the recycled solution you really have to shake it up to dissolve the cermark but it works great.

[Steve Busey]

Interesting tip, Ken - will have to tuck that one away for future reference!

[Dan Hintz]

If you wash with alcohol from the start, you can let it settle in a sealed container. By washing it off in small amounts using alcohol directly, there's little to no clumping.

[Gary Hair]

Have you done a cost analysis to see how much labor you are paying to recycle? My past experience with recycling made it clear that with the cost of a 250g container, it just wasn't worth the time to recycle. It does suck that on most parts I wash off about 90% of what was sprayed on, but the money I make on the parts is many times more than the cost of the Cermark. The last Cermark I bought netted me something in the neighborhood of $25,000 in revenue, that's just shy of 200 times the cost of the Cermark. It makes more sense to spend my time lasering rather than washing, scraping and shaking recycled Cermark. That all changes if you have someone who is being paid but has nothing else to do, then it makes sense, but if they could be producing revenue then the numbers don't work out.

[Ken Baker Overland Park, Ks]

I agree with you Gary regarding the awesome ROI of cermark. It may be that I am the product of depression era parents but seeing that gold go down the drain just goes against my grain. Regarding time to recycle, our typical run time for a burn is 40-60 minutes leaving plenty of down time to wash and package the previous job and to prep the next.

[Mike Null]

Gary's got it right.

[Bill Cunningham]

Well, I have to wash it off anyway, so I just wash it off in a glass container using methyl hydrate and a brush. The MH evaporates, in a day, and I just scrape the cermark off the container and dump it into a sealed jar and add Alcohol when I need it. It only takes a few minutes, and I've only used about one spray can of LM6000 in ten years. Call me Cheap..But I charge $3.50 per sq. inch with a minimum of 5sq. inches for the public, and 10 sq inches for industrial.

[Dave Sheldrake]

I'm not in to the Cermark engraving stuff (I have YAGS) but MEK does a very nice job of breaking it down for those who wish to recycle.

No matter which way you go (recycle/throw away), nobody ever got rich, and a lot of rich people got poor by wasting money :)

cheers

Dave

[Gary Hair]

nobody ever got rich, and a lot of rich people got poor by wasting money

That's absolutely right Dave and exactly why I asked the OP about a cost analysis. The cost for the Cermark saved vs the (revenue lost / wages paid) for recovery doesn't work out in favor of recovery. I use $120/hour for pricing, most of the time I get closer to $250/$300 when Cermarking. If I spend just 10 minutes recovering the "waste", I have to recover $20 (at my $120 rate) of Cermark for it to pay off. Considering a 250 gram tub is about $150, that is 33 grams worth of Cermark, or about 1/7th of the tub. I thin Cermark about 10:1 with Denatured alcohol so that is enough to cover an enormous number of parts, far more than I could possibly clean off in that 10 minutes. To make the point another way - if you have someone that you are paying $15.00/hour to do the work (about $25.00 with taxes, benefits, insurance, etc.), then they would have to recover 1/6th of a tub (41 grams) per hour to make sense. Again, that's just not likely. So, to make a long story longer... it just doesn't add up to take any time recovering Cermark that is worth a few pennies when I could have made a few dollars. What's the old saying? Penny-wise, pound-foolish...

[Dave Sheldrake]

Same here Gary, I get asked why I throw away a lot of part sheet materials. The cost of storing them or resetting machines to use them costs me more than full sheets.

Cost Vs effect , everyone's is different, for me it doesn't work to muck about with small bits (They get given to the local recycling guy who uses them to make fuel logs for his burner) My scrap gets taken away for free and he gets free materials :)

cheers

Dave

[Chuck Stone]

To make the point another way - if you have someone that you are paying $15.00/hour to do the work (about $25.00 with taxes, benefits, insurance, etc.), then they would have to recover 1/6th of a tub (41 grams) per hour to make sense.

Considering that you were going to wash the Cermark off anyway.. that's not extra labor, it's the same labor
You were going to pay for anyway. The difference is that you're saving the effluent instead of dumping it.
It evaporates on it's own, so there's no labor there.. perhaps slightly more labor for being more careful,
washing the part in a container rather than a sink.. so I don't think those numbers work for everyone.

[Mike Null]

I just posted this in the deals and discounts forum but Engraver's Network is running a special on LMM6000 in the 250 gram jars. See that post for detail.